Editing Distributed Computing Environment (section)

==History==
As part of the formation of OSF, various members contributed many of their ongoing research projects as well as their commercial products. For example, HP/Apollo contributed its Network Computing Environment (NCS) and CMA Threads products.  Siemens Nixdorf contributed its X.500 server and ASN/1 compiler tools.  At the time, network computing was quite popular, and many of the companies involved were working on similar [[Remote procedure call|RPC]]-based systems. By integrating security, RPC and other distributed services on a single distributed computing environment, OSF could offer a major advantage over SVR4, allowing any DCE-supporting system (namely OSF/1) to interoperate in a larger network.

The DCE "request for technology" was issued by the OSF in 1989.
The first OSF DCE vendor product came out in 1992.<ref name="change" >
J. Mansfield and J. Clothier.
[https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA307256.pdf "Distributed Computing Environment: An Architecture for Supporting Change?"].
1995.
</ref>{{rp|3}}

The DCE system was, to a large degree, based on independent developments made by each of the partners. [[DCE/RPC]] was derived from the ''[[Network Computing System]]'' (NCS) created at [[Apollo Computer]]. The naming service was derived from work done at Digital. DCE/DFS was based on the [[Andrew File System]] (AFS) originally developed at [[Carnegie Mellon University]]. The authentication system was based on [[Kerberos (protocol)|Kerberos]]. By combining these features, DCE offers a fairly complete system for network computing. Any machine on the network can authenticate its users, gain access to resources, and call them remotely using a single integrated [[Application Programming Interface|API]].

The rise of the [[Internet]], [[Java (programming language)|Java]] and [[web services]] stole much of DCE's [[mindshare]] through the mid-to-late 1990s, and competing systems such as [[CORBA]] appeared as well.

One of the major uses of DCE today is [[Microsoft]]'s [[Distributed Component Object Model|DCOM]] and [[ODBC]] systems, which use DCE/RPC (in [[MSRPC]]) as their network transport layer.{{Cn|date=December 2023}}

OSF and its projects eventually became part of [[The Open Group]], which released DCE 1.2.2 under a [[free software license]] (the [[GNU Lesser General Public License|LGPL]]) on 12 January 2005.<ref>
[https://www.iaps.com/DCE-open-source-announcement.html "DCE Open Source Licensing"].
2005.
</ref><ref>
[https://lwn.net/Articles/119042/ "DCE to be released under the LGPL"].
2005.
</ref>

DCE 1.1 was available much earlier under the OSF BSD license, and resulted in [[FreeDCE]] being available since 2000. FreeDCE contains an implementation of DCOM.<ref name="advogato" >
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170628063652/http://www.advogato.org/article/817.html "The Open Group releases DCE 1.2.2 as LGPL'd Free Software"].
</ref>

One of the major systems built on top of DCE was [[Encina (software)|Encina]], developed by [[Transarc]] (later acquired by [[IBM]]). IBM used Encina as a foundation to port its primary mainframe transaction processing system ([[CICS]]) to non-mainframe platforms, as [[IBM TXSeries]]. (However, later versions of TXSeries have removed the Encina component.)